Mourning Lincoln (19 page)

THE GLOOM THAT DESCENDED ON
Lincoln’s supporters was overwhelming, and yet they ultimately looked forward, in faith, to the post–Civil War world. A providential view of history contained within it an inherent optimism, even if believers had to suffer all along the way, and in this spirit mourners embraced the idea that Lincoln’s assassination would make Union victory even better. Indeed, for African Americans it was impossible not to continue celebrating the destruction of slavery despite such profound loss. The president had been dead for less than a week when 250 black men, who had taken flight in order to evade Confederate impressment, celebrated Union victory and their own liberty by marching and singing in front of Yankee soldiers. No more than a week after the assassination, a group of former slaves, overjoyed to come into contact with Union men sailing north from Mobile, were seen “jumping about & swinging their hands” in joy. Slavery had torn the Union apart, and now with victory—even without President Lincoln—the Union was safe, and slavery
appeared to be no more. When Lincoln died, all hope at first seemed lost, wrote Garland White, runaway slave and chaplain of the Twenty-Eighth U.S. Colored Infantry, to his friend William Seward, the wounded secretary of state. Soon, though, White felt sure that the nation was “again Safe from the powers that sought to devide distroy & sink it in Eternal Shame.” For George Gaskell, a white officer, and his men of the Eleventh U.S. Colored Heavy Artillery, the war’s outcome would not be diminished. “Aside from this great calamity,” Gaskell wrote to his sister, “the prospects are bright.” Frederick Douglass had already made the same point on the very day the president died, at least when it came to the integrity of the nation: “Though Abraham Lincoln dies, the Republic lives.”
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Victory could not long be overshadowed for white soldiers either, no matter their views on slavery. The British-born John Burrud, fighting with the 160th New York, felt sure that “the Calamity will not Change the result of the War,” for with Confederate defeat, he wrote to his wife, “the Country is Safe.” Mourners on the home front agreed. “How full of promise is the future!” enthused Samuel Haven after the assassination. When Haven, who had lost a son in the war, explained that the world seemed “brighter on account of the blackness of darkness” which had recently descended, he may have meant Lincoln’s death, all four years of war, or both. As another white man wrote in his diary, “The nation still lives & cannot be assassinated.”
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But manifestations of shock and grief persisted alongside this optimism. “Splitting headache and no wonder,” wrote the minister Edward Everett Hale in the days after Easter Sunday. On the Tuesday after Easter, Anna Lowell still felt “very tired & exhausted in mind & body.” At her Sunday school class the following week, her heart still felt so full that she wasn’t ready to divert attention from the assassination. When the men in Rudolph Rey’s company received news that Confederate general Joseph Johnston had surrendered to Sherman in late April, not a cheer went up, for the soldiers had “not got over morning for there late
President
.” Even with peace formally declared, “not a solitary cheer was hird from the wole army,” Rey noted. Elizabeth Blackwell, a doctor in New York City, thought that mourning for Lincoln would “hang always on a never fading memory.”
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All through the spring, mourners would ponder God and the assassination. “We bow with meek and humble resignation to his Divine will, because He does all things well,” wrote the black Union officer and radical
abolitionist Martin Delany in late May. Weeks after Lincoln’s death, Lydia Maria Child reasoned that “even the removal of kind and honest ‘old Abe’” had been “necessary for the completion of the great work.” Whereas for Rodney Dorman and other Confederates, God’s purpose was plain—the Good Friday crime was retribution for Union victory (even if that left plenty of unanswered questions about why God had not orchestrated Confederate victory in the first place)—for Sarah Browne and other Union supporters, the theological questions yielded all kinds of contradictions. Amid their spiritual puzzlement, Lincoln’s mourners looked also toward more earthly realms for answers to why the president had been slain. Who, exactly, they wanted to know, was responsible for the murder?
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Love

PEOPLE
LOVED
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
. That was the word they used. “I never felt before how deep a hold he had on the hearts of the people,” wrote a Union soldier, and women tended to describe such feelings with greater effusion. “O that good, great man, whom we so loved & revered!” Anna Lowell fretted. “It seemed strange to love so much one whom we have never seen—but we did.” President Lincoln had blurred the boundaries between leader and loved one, and at his death the categories blurred yet more.
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Whereas a beloved intimate could never be replaced, in a democracy one esteemed leader would always be succeeded by another. Though astounded by Lincoln’s death, Theodore Lyman nevertheless reasoned that “we have fought with success for four years, and I do not believe the shooting of one man is going to trouble us much now.” True, reflected Frederick Sawyer (he had been at Ford’s Theatre that night), “no man on the continent can do just what Mr. Lincoln could have done,” but God would never leave a nation’s work in the hands of a single person. Or as freedpeople in Virginia put it, “God raised us up one friend and He will raise us up another.”
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The trouble with these rationalizations was that people thought of Lincoln
as far more than a statesman, and many mourners felt—as one put it—”personally afflicted” by his death. Some invoked similes, mourning “as if for a dear friend.” For others, no simile or metaphor was necessary. To the readers of San Francisco’s black newspaper, the president had been a “beloved friend.” For “us of the U.S. colored army,” wrote a white officer, “the death of Lincoln is indeed the loss of a friend.” Even more, Lincoln felt to many like family. A white captain in a black regiment felt as if he had lost “some near kindred.” Union soldiers, a white man wrote, “could not of felt any worse if evry one of them had lost their nearest reletave.” Mourners saw this sentiment all around: “Everywhere it seemed as if the death were of one near and dear in the family” or “as though a private grief had come to each family.” In Chicago, mused one mourner, “almost every family circle seems to be broken.”
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In particular, people thought of Lincoln as a father, a symbol that held religious as well as familial meaning. An elderly freedwoman called the slain president “a mighty good father to us,” and a white soldier told his brother that the men “all claimed him as a father” (Union soldiers had long spoken of Lincoln as “Father Abraham”). Lincoln’s mourners, one woman mused, were like orphans, a term defined in the nineteenth century as fatherless children. Symbolic as this imagery may have been, Lincoln’s mourners felt moved to compare their feelings to more literal personal losses. “I could not have been
more
shocked had it been my Father,” wrote a Pennsylvania businessman. An American in Paris mourned for Lincoln “as sorrowfully and far more bitterly than I mourned for my dear father.” Even more, when a freedwoman in North Carolina got word, she felt as if both her father and mother had died at the same time.
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As for the vanquished (who held ambivalent feelings for President Jefferson Davis by war’s end), they gave their love to General Robert E. Lee. On the morning of April 9, 1865, Lee had said he would “rather die a thousand deaths” than surrender to Grant. Lee had done the deed and had not died, but to his admirers surrender felt akin to death, which only elevated the general more. After Appomattox, one Confederate soldier called Lee an “illustrious chieftain” superior to Washington and Napoleon, vowing that southern babies would be taught to lisp his name. “Dear noble old man,” mused a Virginia woman, invoking words that Lincoln’s mourners used to describe their late leader. “I love & revere him now more than ever.”
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5
Blame

FOR SARAH BROWNE, THE “UNPARALLELED
outrage” of Lincoln’s assassination was “enough to rouse up the spirit of the meekest angel.” Grieving and in shock, Sarah was also angry. She wanted the assassin and his conspirators to suffer, but it wasn’t they alone who were guilty. She also wanted the “Fathers” of the rebellion to suffer, for she believed that Confederate political and military leaders had made the actions of Booth and the conspirators possible. The many middling and poor white people of the South, for their part, had been drawn into the war “against the dictates of their hearts and Consciences,” Sarah believed, and thus deserved gentler treatment.
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Sarah expressed grief more vividly than anger, while Albert vented a fury more easily permitted to men, enraged at the Confederates around him in the South, those “dastardly cowardly wretches” with their “devilish purposes.” Slavery, Albert proclaimed, had caused the murder of President Lincoln (the “tree of Slavery,” he wrote, had “borne fruit” in the assassination), and the terrible crime was the “culmination of the teachings from the Southern pulpit and press,” not to mention the leadership of Jefferson Davis and all of “Southern Society.” When it came to the “poor deluded ones”—the white southerners whom Sarah excused—Albert agreed that
they should be pardoned freely, as long as their leaders were hanged or forever banished from the nation. The anger Albert Browne felt at Lincoln’s assassination turned him into a savage, he confessed. Subjugate them, humiliate them, exterminate them, he cried, underlining the word
exterminate
. “We have played with this serpent long enough now,” he wrote; “let us kill the monster and all its infernal brood.” If Sarah thought he had spewed enough bile, Albert assured her there was “a heap left.”
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FOR RODNEY DORMAN, GLEE WAS
fleeting and anger enduring. As far as Dorman was concerned, John Wilkes Booth alone was responsible for the murder of Abraham Lincoln, but of course the Yankees would “molest a great many people” who had nothing to do with the deed, acting with revenge, “against all law” and with “total disregard of all rights.” Unlawful power exercised by the conquerors infuriated Dorman no end—how the Yankees did “beshit & befoul” all they touched in their “fraudulent, forceable, unwarranted, contemptible manner,” he wrote in his diary. As for Booth, he should be honored for his manly bravery, just as in ancient Greece, Harmodius and Aristogeiton were honored for saving Athens by murdering a tyrant.
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The Yankees said that slavery had killed Lincoln, but in Rodney Dorman’s view, slavery was a force of good: a benevolent institution in which masters loved and provided for their “servants,” who in turn loved and needed their subjugators. “In some instances,” Dorman conceded, slaves had “not been treated as they ought,” but those instances were exceptional. In his version of American history, wicked white northerners had stolen Africans from their native lands (here he called the victims “slaves,” rather than “servants”), sold them to white southerners, then stole them back by “force & fraud” during the Civil War, making for a “double crime, aggravated!” Indeed, at times Dorman reserved greater hostility for white northerners than he did for the freedpeople, for without white instigators, he felt sure, black people would have remained content with enslavement. It was those blasted abolitionists who had awakened the desire for liberty, and the black soldiers he saw in Jacksonville—the literal embodiment of that liberation—were thus intolerable or, in Dorman’s words, “beyond the powers of endurance of man.” All during the spring and summer of 1865,
Rodney Dorman seethed at the Yankees. “The only remedy,” he confided to his journal, would be “a general extermination of the whole of them.”
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LINCOLN’S MOURNERS WERE ANGRY
, very angry. Reconciliation to the will of God and acceptance of the assassination as part of a divine plan for the nation’s glorious future did not exempt the guilty parties from facing justice.

Anger was a complicated emotion for nineteenth-century Americans. Long associated with a deplorable lack of self-control, anger, particularly men’s anger, had been likened to barbarism, unbecoming to civilized people. These cultural assumptions had recently begun to change, with the idea that well-moderated fury could be put to good use, and even savage rage like Albert Browne’s was understandable in particularly abominable circumstances. That permission extended almost exclusively to white men of the middling and upper classes, while women were meant never to be angry, under any circumstances. But with Lincoln’s murder, these social rules evaporated, just as had the dictates against men weeping, and mourners embraced their fury without compunction. As one man wrote in his diary, describing a pervasive state, “Wrath flashes through the gloom.”
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A vitriol of stunning intensity runs through the record of personal responses to Lincoln’s assassination.
Indignation
. That was one way mourners described their feelings, as if they had personally been victims of an unjust act (recall that Sarah Browne had pictured Albert’s initial feelings as “honor and indignation”). At a meeting of black San Franciscans, poet and plasterer James Madison Bell spoke of pain “mixed with indignation.” A white woman in Boston juggled “amazement, horror, indignation, and a feeling of personal bereavement.”
Rage
. That word was even more commonly invoked. On a New England street on the day Lincoln died, people wept, “fired with rage.” On Easter Sunday in Philadelphia, a woman watched her brother-in-law “crushed with sorrow” yet “savage with rage.” In Washington on Sunday too, people appeared “wild with grief and rage.” Down south, the sorrowing hearts of Union soldiers and officers filled up with hatred and fury.
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